Once again, intelligent technology meets the world of
wines. It's not about a decanter robot that shows the
perfect temperature and bottle volume. Neither an
app like Uvinum (for iPhone or
Android)
where you can discover and buy fantastic new wines. This
week, a small group of students from the Technological University
of Dresden developed a smart wine glass. This
glass recognizes and analyzes the amount of consumed
alcohol.

How does it work?

The glass is made out of a special material which
measures the contained alcohol by pure contact.
For exact results, the glass, as well as the wine, have to be
clean. The material consists of chemical elements that react in a
certain way with alcohol. The higher the alcohol
content, the stronger the chemical reaction. This
reaction takes place on the glass bottom and remains more or less
invisible to the human eye. You'd have to take a closer look to
recognize any changes. "You have to imagine, it kind of works
like a normal medicalthermometer.", explains Paul
D. (27), one of the brains behind the operation.

What do I need this for?

Well, this smart wine glass is also connected to an
app on your smartphone which currently runs through a
beta testing phase. Let's say, you're at a dinner with some
friends and you still have to drive home. Of course, you can
enjoy a bit of wine, you say, but where do you cross the
line? How do you know you're still under the legal 0,8
permille? Now, the app comes into play. Before starting, you have
fed the app with data like age, drinking
history, weight and height amongst others. The
Wine-O-Meter provides the exact amount of
alcohol in your glass of wine and calculates your
level. Furthermore, you don't have to check your mobile
device with every sip you take. The moment you're close to
reaching the maximum alcohol level, your wine glass activates
special sieve hiding on the glass bottom and filters the
alcohol. This way, you can enjoy your wine without
worrying about getting drunk. But this Wine-O-Meter doesn't only
protect you from drinking when you're driving. You can also ask
it to warn you when you're getting too tipsy. The user sets his
or her own limits.

Planned improvements

The three students, Paul D., Susanna R. and Xin M., also
plan on protecting your love life with this
wineable-app. It's their idea to integrate the
Wine-O-Meter with messenger services like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Starting a certain level of alcohol, the app blocks these
messenger services and protects you from sending
embarrassing texts or photos. Besides, at
the current state of development, you can only drink wine in
it. Our students, however, told us that it's just a question of
feeding more and the correct data in order to enable the
glass to also analyze beer, whisky and other drinks. If
the project ends in success, there is no reason why this
shouldn't happen.

Disadvantage

This invention is not smart enough to check if you used another
wine glass or tried from your friends. So you should keep a
little bit disciplined and enjoy wine only from your own smart
wine glass.

Forget that you've been fooled on April Fool's Day with these
delicious wine recommendations: